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January 13, 2003

StartrekUK.com recently held an interview with Trek illustrator Rick Sternbach. Below is an excerpt:

Question posted by startrekuk:
In our last interview with you at ENTERPRISEUK.TV, you mentioned that although the writers for 'ENTERPRISE' didn't sign you up, you did, however, provide them with some astronomical tech data during the early development of the series, which spelled out how many stars might be contained within given volumes of space (reachable by various low warp factors, from WF2 to WF5), and how many of those stars might harbor habitable planets. I was wondering if you could provide us with some more detail about the data that you gave them? And secondly, can you tell whether the writers have been following your tech data?

Rick: I can't lay my hands on the exact sketches and tables that I made up, but I can tell you that what I was offering was some simple bits of information concerning the operational radius of a starship at certain low warp factors, between WF2 and WF5, using the old scale of WF cubed to get the equivalent number of times c (lightspeed). From the total radius of a year's worth of travel, you'd be able to get at least some sense of the number of stars you could visit within a season. The maximum radius isn't the same as a random walk within the sphere, of course, but you can still derive some number of targets. The stars within a given sphere will only have a certain fraction of them being "habitable," like Class M. the whole exercise was mainly to give Berman and the writers some basic idea of the constraints of "slow" interstellar travel, and how warp technology (= speed) could mature over time.

As far as I could tell from the very few episodes of ENTERPRISE that I've watched, none of the data had any effect. They write the tech with no real concern as to whether it means anything. Interesting tech isn't part of the equation any more. Good science fiction has always been a melding of those two words, science and fiction, and while you can have media SF biased to either the science side or the fiction side, I believe ENTERPRISE has concentrated on the latter, actively retreating from any believable science and technology that was so well weaved into previous Trek shows. I believe Braga said something about ENTERPRISE stories no longer needing to rely on technological solutions; I would point out that a show like CSI does that quite well each week, and manages to get much better ratings.

[...]

Question posted by StarFleet:
Now that 'NEMESIS' has debuted in the cinemas, would you have changed the look of any of the new sets that we see in the film?

Rick: I don't have any strong feelings about the sets, other than to say they looked good and fit the overall styles of their respective cultures. The Starfleet environments looked properly businesslike in the tech areas and state of the art comfortable in the living areas. The Romulan Senate was nicely classical in its look. The Reman ship interior was a bit sparse in the sense I didn't see any unifying style, especially when contrasted with the little curvy fighter, but I'm also not saying that the two had to look the same. I don't normally think about set design, but you asked the question.

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